The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi

Preface

13 Preface IMET AND BECAME ACQUAINTED with Jacques Dalarun three years ago at Mendelpass on the occasion of the 12th International Week of Study on the “Societas Christiana,” whose topic was Church and Feudal World in the 12th and 13th Centuries. He had just arrived in Rome as director of the medieval department of the École Française de Rome and was becoming brilliantly and effectively involved in historical research within the ranks of the “Roman School,” distinguished in the past by the fruitful teaching of Raffaello Morghen, Raoul Manselli and Arsenio Frugoni, and still distinguished today by the presence of Gilmo Arnaldi, Ludovco Gatto, Paolo Delogu and Chiara Frugoni. His credits already included an exceptional piece of historical and philological research on the life and the new spiritual and religious contribution of Robert d’Arbrissel. An important study, it ranked him with one of his predecessors in the direction of the medieval department of the École Française, André Vauchez, whom I got to know many years ago in Todi and at this University on the occasion of the presentation of one of his important works, published, at the wishes of Pietro Zerbi, by Vita e Pensiero in 1978. The work, entitled The Spirituality of the Medieval West, was reprinted a few months ago with a preface by Giorgio Cracco. But my collaboration with Jacques Dalarun, which began in the Dolomites and in the Tirolese taverns of Mendelpass, was continued in the fantastic karst scenery of the Gulf of Trieste and in the cafés of that most European of Italian cities. There, with his friend Paolo Cammerosano, he saw to it that the congress on The Forms of Political Propaganda in the 13th and 14th Centuries (whose proceedings were published in 14 THE MISADVENTURE OF FRANCIS OF ASSISI 1994 as Volume 201 in the Collection de l’Ecole Française de Rome) was carried out to scientific perfection. After that, each of us became involved in topics connected with personal interests. Ever since his studies on Robert d’Arbrissel, Jacques has always given priority to very acute and penetrating investigation of the relationships between men and women at the moment of their vocational choice, especially during those years of unusual psychological and human openness when the Church lived in the great and exciting era of “religious movements in their nascent state,” in other words, between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. That is how his research on Franciscan men and women began, thanks also to his deep and collaborative relationships with Franciscan scholars, from Roberto Rusconi to Attilio Bartoli Langeli, from Grado Merlo to Giovanni Miccoli, from Clara Gennaro to Chiara Frugoni, from Giulia Barone to Luigi Pellegrini, even to Claudio Leonardi and his students, to whom medievalists owe much in the area of bibliography. So there have appeared, or will appear, important works on Francis and Clare: Francesco: un passaggio: Donna e donne negli scritti e nelle leggende di Francesco d’Assisi, Rome, Viella, 1994, and Chiara e gli uomini, scheduled for publication in 1996. Perhaps it is in his efforts to analyze the Clare sources in order to bring out her personality, that we discover how Dalarun has allowed us at Fara Sabina and Manduria to plumb the depths of a historian who is able not only to read the documents, but especially to penetrate the mind of a man or woman by situating them carefully in the time when they lived. As he says, Clare listened to Francis, who in turn listened to the Gospel. Thus she was introduced to Christ. In other words, her religious choice is the religious choice of Francis, but that does not mean she is a feeble echo of him. At that time and in the city of Assisi, for a woman to make such a choice demanded exceptional courage and an extraordinary capacity for rebellion. The novelty is not that Clare expresses this in men’s language, but in her manner of arranging the words and in the place where she says them. Indeed, she astutely places Francis’s teaching and words placed before the most important parts of the Forma Vitae she wrote for San Damiano, especially the chapter on 15 PREFACE poverty. And her companions, with little dissemblance, remembered a woman who never yielded to male powers: the feudal power of her family as a young girl, the sacred...